Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller (best large ereader txt) 📕

“Ready?”

Julius nods and Jeanie draws down the sheet. His eyes move over the body’s surface, not lingering on any single point. He is adept at not remembering the details of the first time he saw a dead body. The images of it have blurred like a photograph smudged by the rain, and there are no smells that bring it back, no human noises. It is only the sensation of an engine on his bones—the way its bass note resonates through him—that he can’t extricate from his physical reaction.

“I couldn’t get her nightie or dressing gown out from underneath,” Jeanie says. “We have to roll her.”

“Towards me,” Julius says. He pulls the body over, while Jeanie tugs at the nightclothes. The flesh is cold, of course, and the body stiff, the muscles hard.

“Get them out,” Julius says, holding the body. He closes his eyes and thinks of Shelley Swift. He went to her flat today above the fish and chip shop. The sash window in her wedge-shaped kitchen which her cat uses for coming and going was jammed open. The rope was broken on one side, but he greased the parts of the mechanism he could reach without removing the whole window and got the thing moving again. Shelley Swift made tea while her cat purred and sat on the counter. As Julius checked that the window slid smoothly, he watched Shelley Swift from the corner of his eye while she squeezed teabags against the sides of the mugs, flinging the bags into the sink, and when she thought he wasn’t looking adjusting the elasticated neck of her peasant-style blouse, so that it sat below her shoulders and showed her freckled skin. She dragged the cat off the counter and into her arms, cradling it like a huge hairy baby. “Pixie, Pixie, Pixie-pie,” she crooned, rubbing her cheek against the cat, which without moving its mouth or its eyes wore an expression of bored tolerance. Shelley Swift came closer to Julius, rocking the cat and saying, “Meet Julius, Pixie. Isn’t he a nice man, mending your window?” The cat purred up against her breasts, the tops of which showed above her blouse, and when she let the cat go it leaped away, unexpectedly light-footed for its size. Shelley Swift looked down at herself and picked a couple of cat hairs off her skin, tutting. He watched and he knew Shelley Swift knew he was watching. She talked about her flat and the whiff of the public toilets which drifted up sometimes, outdoing the fish and chip shop, the thrillers she liked to read, and her job—stories about her manager and how even if she took her sandwiches in a plastic box, they tasted of brick dust by lunchtime. “It gets everywhere.” She pulled at the elastic of her top and looked down again, laughing, a husky grate, which he found he liked. It was good to hear Shelley Swift laughing the day after his mother died.

He wasn’t planning on telling her what had happened, but she winkled it out of him and they stayed in the kitchen for an hour or more after he finished the window. Her expression of tenderness and sympathy had been almost too much for him to bear.

Jeanie pulls at Dot’s nightie and dressing gown and this time they come free, and Julius lowers the body. She ruches up the knickers, high-waisted greying cotton, which Julius finds more embarrassing than his mother’s nakedness. Jeanie tugs them over the feet, and by dragging one side and then the other she gets them above the knees, but there they stick.

Brother and sister stand back. “If only she’d worn underwear to bed,” Julius says.

“Best to let things breathe,” Jeanie says in an impersonation of their mother.

“Really?” Julius says. “Is that what she told you? I was told pyjamas, always. To stop any fiddling, I reckon.”

“Julius!” Jeanie laughs. She looks at the knickers. “What are we going to do?”

“Maybe the dress will cover them?”

“We can’t bury her with her underwear half on.” Jeanie puts her hand over her mouth to stop herself from laughing again. “Can we?”

“Inappropriate.” Julius is laughing too.

“Indecent.”

“She’s never been seen naked. We can’t start now.”

The words spill out as they laugh.

“Not even Dad?”

“Especially not Dad.”

“Not on their wedding night?”

“No, surely not.”

And then, just as suddenly as it came, the laughter is gone.

“Poor Mum.”

“It wasn’t much of a life, was it?” Julius says.

“She was happy, I think. She had us, the garden, the cottage. Music.”

“Was that enough?”

“Of course it was enough. It’s enough for me.”

They’re silent, until Jeanie says, “I don’t know how we’re going to get the dress on her.”

“Doesn’t she have one with buttons down the front?”

“They all do up at the back, apart from her house dress which ties at the side. But she did the housework in that. It wouldn’t be right.”

“An apron?”

“Buried in an apron.” Jeanie starts laughing again.

“We’ll have to cut them,” Julius says. “The knickers and the dress. Cut them all the way up the back, and the sleeves of the dress, and then we can lay them over her and tuck them around the sides so it looks like she’s wearing them. It’s only us who’ll see her. And the undertaker.”

Jeanie is still then, and silent.

“And God,” Julius adds.

Jeanie flaps her hand dismissively. She knows Julius is joking. None of them has ever believed in God or gone to church. “He doesn’t care what the dead look like.”

“Even if their knickers are around their knees?”

“Especially then.” Jeanie pulls the knickers off. “I’ve been thinking. What about if we don’t have a funeral or a service? What if we dress her, wrap her up, and bury her in the garden?”

Julius frowns. “Can we do that?”

“Who says we can’t? It’s our land. She’s our mother. There’s a patch near the apple trees which would be nice. What do you think she’d have wanted? To be next to her vegetable garden or some burial place full of people she doesn’t know? Or worse,